Sequence classification for machine translation

Abstract

Classification of sequences, such as the translation of natural language sentences, is carried out using an independence assumption. The independence assumption is an assumption that the probability of a correct translation of a source sentence word into a particular target sentence word is independent of the translation of other words in the sentence. Although this assumption is not a correct one, a high level of word translation accuracy is nonetheless achieved. In particular, discriminative training is used to develop models for each target vocabulary word based on a set of features of the corresponding source word in training sentences, with at least one of those features relating to the context of the source word. Each model comprises a weight vector for the corresponding target vocabulary word. The weights comprising the vectors are associated with respective ones of the features; each weight is a measure of the extent to which the presence of that feature for the source word makes it more probable that the target word in question is the correct one.

Description

BACKGROUND[0001]The present invention relates to sequence classification such as required when carrying out machine translation of natural language sentences.[0002]In machine translation, the objective is to translate a source sentence such as the English sentence[0003]I need to make a collect callinto a target sentence, such as the Japanese version of that sentence This task is a special case of the more general problem known as sequence classification.[0004]Stated in more general terms, the natural language translation problem can be understood as a specific case of taking a source symbol sequence and classifying it as being a particular target symbol sequence. For convenience, the discussion herein uses the terms “word,”“sentence,” and “translation” rather than “symbol,”“sequence” and “classification,” respectively. It is to be understood, however, that the invention is applicable to the more general case of translating one sequence of symbols into another. It will also be apprec...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0012]Although a strong assumption, the independence assumption that informs the present invention allows for a source translation process to be carried out with far fewer computational resources than if the above-described interdependence were to be taken into account as in, for example, a sentence-level translation approach.

Problems solved by technology

However, in the general case of natural language translation—or even in many specialized translation environments—the number of possible sentences is exponentially large, making the computational requirements of training the models prohibitively resource-intensive.

This independence assumption is, in fact, incorrect.

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